During a two-hour speech at a literary symposium in Beijing earlier this week – a rare attendance for a Chinese president – Mr. Xi discussed how art should serve the people. He called for morally inspiring art that should “be like sunshine from the blue sky and the breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste and clean up undesirable work styles.”

Amid calls for patriotic art, Mr. Xi also said buildings such as the CCTV headquarters, which is one of Beijing’s most iconic towers and is nicknamed “Big Pants” for its design akin to trousers, should no longer pop up in the city. Completed in 2008, the CCTV tower, which was designed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus, has been the brunt of jokes among Chinese netizens for years.

In recent years, Beijing has seen several “strange-looking” new structures grace the skyline. In 2012, Pritzker-Prize winning Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid unveiled Galaxy SOHO, an office and retail building shaped like an egg near Beijing’s Chaoyangmen subway station. Ms. Hadid also just finished designed Wangjing SOHO in northeast Beijing, a three-tower complex designed to look like fluid mountains. Both buildings were built by SOHO China, the well-known real estate firm headed by husband-wife team Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin. Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, formally known as the National Olympic Stadium, and the Water Cube, or the National Aquatics Center, are other iconic structures in the capital.

Unique buildings across China include a bottle-shaped office in Yichang City, Hubei, a giant teapot-shaped building in Wuxi in east China, and a Guangzhou’s Circle Building that’s been nicknamed the “copper coin.”

Mr. Xi’s criticism comes at a time when China is just beginning to gain international attention for its architectural design. In 2012, Wang Shu, an architect based in Hangzhou, became the first Chinese to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize.